With the proliferation of the Internet and mobile computing, everyone expects to remain connected with others at all times, anywhere he or she may travel. Fundamentally, people expect to be able to send and receive electronic messages virtually anywhere in the world where there is network connectivity. This expectation has been fueled by the explosion of inexpensive personal mobile computing devices, such as laptop computers, tablet computers, personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, cell phones, and smart phones, and the near ubiquity of wired and wireless broadband Internet connectivity.
Despite the widespread usage of electronic messages for more than a decade, no electronic message format or class of electronic message formats has become dominant. It is not uncommon for one to use his or her personal computing device to send and receive messages in multiple different electronic message formats. Some classes of electronic messaging formats have been available for a long time, such as phone calls, faxes, and e-mail; others are very new, such as videoconferencing, teleconferencing, SMS texts, and chat. The actual format of the message is of little consequence to users; they expect to be able to communicate with others using whatever device or message format is appropriate or available at the time.
At the same time, because personal mobile computing devices have become so inexpensive and near replacements for traditional desktop computers and landline telephones, many people possess many different devices and use each device to send and receive electronic messages. A user may interact with another person by exchanging messages with that other person using different devices and different types of messages. A user may, for instance, send an e-mail to a customer through his or her laptop computer, the customer may respond with an SMS text message to the user's smart phone, and the user may respond by faxing the customer a document through an electronic faxing service.
Navigating a morass of messages of heterogeneous types spread across multiple devices has historically been a time-consuming and confusing process. Users typically must access different devices—or even different applications within a single device—to retrieve snippets of the conversation and mentally piece them together into a cohesive whole. It would be helpful to give users a way to easily view and reply to electronic messages they send and receive at and from their personal computing devices, especially in situations where the users send and receive different types, classes, or formats of electronic messages with their personal computing devices. The present invention provides a solution for this and other needs.